Description

Benoît Gilsoul is a recent discovery of ours. We love how he translated his experience as a premier  stained glass artist back into painting.  The medium here is oil on paper and the way he smeared it to produce a translucent effect -- like glass -- is just stunning.  This work was purchased from a sale of his estate.

 Details

• Benoît Gilsoul (Belgian/American, 1914-2000)
• Untitled Minimal Composition I
• Oil on Arches paper
  
• Dated in lower right hand corner
  
• 24 1/2" x 32" (overall) 22 1/4" x 30" (sheet)
• Newly framed under UV plexiglass
  

About the Artist

Benoît Gilsoul was born in Namur, Belgium in 1914. After completing his primary schooling he entered the Acadėmie Royale des Beaux Arts, the top Belgian art college. During the six years at the Acadėmie, Gilsoul acquired a solid artistic training and by 1933 had already founded the sécessionist art group: “L’Esquisse,” an influential group of young artists in Belgium that later developed into the “Salon National des Jeunes Artistes.” He was a close friend and fellow classmate of Nicolas de Staël. In 1935 the two of them, along with another classmate, took an extensive bike tour of France, Spain and Italy. Upon graduation from the Acadėmie in 1938 Gilsoul continued to travel and paint extensively. 

Gilsoul may have continued painting exclusively if not for a fateful trip he took to the United States in 1960.  Like many artists of that time, he fell in love with the American art scene and returned with his family to settle in New York City.  His immigration sponsor was Jean-Jacques Duval, of the Duval Studio, a maker of architectural stained glass.  The Duval Studio, and later the Willett Studio, utilized Gilsoul’s exceptional ability as a painter to render complicated images in stained glass, in what would become known as the “modern style.”  Gilsoul would eventually form his own studio and become one of the foremost stained glass artists in America.  His major works include windows in the Alice Millar Chapel at Northwestern, his translation of a Ben Shahn painting into a monumental leaded glass window at Temple Beth Zion in Buffalo, and a collaboration with Romare Bearden on the artist’s only stained glass work, the triptych entitled, City of Light which was commissioned by the MTA for the Westchester Square Station in New York. Despite his success as a stained glass artist, Gilsoul never abandoned his first love — painting and drawing.  He painted and produced a prodigious amount of works on paper in every media, as well as etched glass, tapestries and sculptures for private collections. 

Gilsoul passed away in 2000.